Moving on With Brock: A Passionate Second Chance Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

deliberately try to harm them made her really angry inside.
    Besides, she has an axe to grind. She became a detective because of the kidnapping of a child. She might not have been able to help that child, but she had begun helping others from then on. 
    Quickly, she punched in the code to the alarm, and went into the small kitchenette that was part of her office to start brewing coffee. Turning up the thermostat got the heat started so that her office would be nice and toasty within a very few minutes. 
    She walked back into the room that held her desk and checked for phone messages. There were a few asking for pricing information and a couple of people she would need to call back regarding an appointment to see her. 
    I really should hire a receptionist or something, she thought. Even if it’s just some part time help. Then I could be out of the office without worrying so much about missing an important message. I could also have more time to focus on getting answers for my clients. 
    Pouring a cup of steaming coffee, Evie went back into her office and sat down at her desk. She spread out the newspaper flat on the desk and started to read the article about the latest missing girl. 
    It was her hope that she might get something on this girl as she read the details. As much as she used to hate her “gift” for making her so different from other people she knew, she had come to accept a long time ago that it could be pretty useful, especially in her line of work. In fact, she had chosen the field of PI work because of what she could do—your purpose in life and your place in the universe and all that crap that sounded loony but somehow very true. It had become easier to do things this way than to try to deal with the police. Most of them never believed her so they didn’t take her seriously when she came to them with valid information, anyway. Idiots. 
    One case in particular had been very painful and frustrating and totally changed her outlook about people in power and those supposed to protect and all that other crap that wasn’t loony at all, but could totally be pathetic once you’ve lost you’re faith in them. Evie had given the police information about where to find an abducted child. She told them what she knew plenty of time in advance to save the child. The problem was that the person she saw taking the child was someone quite important in town so the police had ignored her. And she wasn’t this cynical then. If she had been the person she was now then, she would have pursued the case on her own and to hell with the consequences. But she thought the authority would come through for her and for that child. She placed her faith in the wrong hands.
    Once they found the child, it was too late to save her. The man who kidnapped and killed her was caught red-handed, but when it came to saving that child, it did not matter. Yes, he would not be able to hurt other children. But his victims before he was incarcerated were all dead and nothing could bring them back. 
    And it did not matter that she had not known the child, too, or that she never had any contact with her before the kidnapping. She reached out to her. She tried to ask for help. And she, Evie, could have helped her. And she tried, but she was not able to save her.
    So forget that they were strangers to each other. She had felt that child’s terror, and it was something bitter and painful and wretched. She had been that child’s older sister, mother, grandmother, and bestfriend for that short time she felt her terror before she was murdered. So they weren’t, in all sense of the word, strangers.
    Evie knew she couldn’t go through another one of that experience after that. She gave up on simply helping and took matters into her own hands. 
    She took classes and passed exams and finally was qualified to open up her own private detective agency. Her success rate in solving cases and helping her clients immediately became a bit higher than that of